The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff

By KATE SEKULES

Published: February 7, 2007

''LONDON is the best cocktail city in the world right now,'' Audrey Saunders said. ''I hate to admit it, but it's true.''

The confession is difficult because Ms. Saunders, an owner of the Pegu Club on Houston Street, is seen as the torchbearer for New York City's own bartending resurgence. But she has sampled beverages from Paris to Tortola, and she is convinced that London has more bartenders turning out more sophisticated drinks than any other place.

''Even though it's coming along here, our talent is nowhere near as widespread,'' she said. ''If I hadn't started Pegu Club, I'd probably be in London. I just love what's going on in the scene. The bartenders are so extraordinary -- the professionalism and the skill level and the passion.''

Ten years ago, with the opening of a handful of ''proper cocktail'' establishments, London mixology was in its protozoan stage: the mere appearance of fresh fruit juice in a cocktail glass was considered a giant evolutionary leap. Cocktails caught on, and soon lesser bars were seeking attention with absurd drinks like bacon martinis. Which is why the explosion of sheer quality and variety in the city now strikes connoisseurs of mixed drinks as so fortunate and so welcome.

At certain restaurants -- Zuma, Roka, Hakkasan, Baltic -- the people behind the bar are more of a draw than those in the kitchen. Recently renewed hotel bars -- the Bar at the Dorchester, the Lobby Bar at One Aldwych, Artesian at the Langham Hotel, Claridge's Bar, the Blue Bar at the Berkeley -- are irresistible again, from their soign??r to their deep and focused drinks lists. Stand-alone bo?s that look as if Bond just left (Milk & Honey, Montgomery Place) or Barbarella is about to arrive (the Lonsdale, Trailer Happiness) publish booklet menus with whole sections of rye, shochu, Pisco and cacha?drinks alongside the gins and cognacs.

Asked to nominate the most professional, skilled and passionate London barkeep of all, Ms. Saunders gave the same answer as everybody else: Dick Bradsell. ''He's completely unassuming and so low-key, but he's one of the greats,'' she said. Mr. Bradsell usually gets credit for founding the modern era of London cocktails when he opened Dick's Bar in 1994. (In fact, his tenure as founding mixologist goes back another decade to the semi-legendary clubs Fred's and the Zanzibar.) Not since the Art Deco era, when Harry Craddock ruled the Savoy -- London's premier classic martini destination -- had a bartender's name enjoyed such cachet. As Ms. Saunders put it, ''Any time you find Dick at a bar, that's the place to be.''

Mr. Bradsell earned his renown with an exhaustive knowledge of classic cocktails, precision and speed in constructing them, and, especially, a cheflike ability to build on them continually. ''He's a genius,'' said Claire Smith, one of the successful young mixologists he has trained. ''So many cocktails that we think of as classics in London were actually Dick's inventions.''

At Dick's Bar, in an era of tequila slammers and flavored vodkas, Mr. Bradsell's sophisticated, balanced drinks served in retro glassware hit a chord. It became the hottest place in town, its status not exactly hindered by its rare late-night license. Then, as with Alice Waters in 1970s Berkeley, so with Dick Bradsell in 1990s London: his ideas, his trainees and his drinks went forth and multiplied.

Three years after starting Dick's, Mr. Bradsell opened MatchBar with Jonathan Downey, a former lawyer who found the call of the other kind of bar stronger. ''One of the many things Dick said to me at the beginning was, People will always buy quality,'' Mr. Downey said. ''And he was right.'' By 1997, cocktail bars were proliferating, but they were often more concerned with style than substance -- a tendency Mr. Downey and Mr. Bradsell deplored and set out to correct. Mr. Downey's Match Bar Group now owns five London bars displaying both attributes. ''We're democratizing the quality cocktail,'' he said.

One of the five is the louche, speakeasy-like Milk & Honey, a four-story former Soho strip club inspired by the clandestine bar of the same name on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mr. Downey had been taken to the New York original several years ago by Dale DeGroff, the American mixologist who has branded himself ''King Cocktail,'' with some justification. One year later Mr. Downey hired him as a drinks consultant to the Match Bar Group and opened his own Milk & Honey in London.

The list of drinks by Sasha Petraske, the owner of Milk & Honey in New York, features a few classics -- margarita, mai tai, stinger -- among some 40 originals, like the Cubanada (light rum, lime, maple syrup), the Cock a Bendy (Scotch, sweet vermouth, Campari) and the Rye Port Cobbler (rye, port, Cura?, lemon, orange, pineapple). All are served in refreshingly retro-size compact glasses.